Andrew Gilligan - wibbler.com

Lord Hutton has given his verdict: I shall give mine.Wibbler, 2003
The politics of the last 24 hours has left me distinctly queasy. The Government vote on tuition fees, where they won solely on the appearance of Scottish MPs who aren’t even affected by the bill, was just a taster of things to come. Today’s revelation in the Hutton Report was the icing on Tony Blair’s cake. This time yesterday, we were wondering who would be the next Prime Minister; today, Tony Blair has escaped the flails of justice intact, seemingly stronger than ever.
Certainly, it was a grave accusation that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan thrust at the Government’s door early that morning – namely that they had lied to go to war. Yes, the BBC reporting is at times woefully unbalanced. Yes, the BBC made errors after the Gilligan report was out. But Lord Hutton seems to have focused his entire critique on that one report; 3 minutes of unscripted dialogue and just one fourteen second long sentence that he suggests serves to represent the ethics of the reporter and, as Tony Blair himself may have put it, as the totality of the evidence against the corporation.
The idea that Blair did not have a hand in the naming of Kelly is also highly suspect. This is a government whose modus operandi has been shown, indisputibly, to be ‘top-down’, centralised and autocratic. Blair’s hand is shown to be central to all decisions – except when something goes wrong, when he is conveniently uninvolved.
And now Alastair Campbell is out, all guns blazing. Now, I’ve a great deal of respect for Campbell’s intellect. But this is a man, a former writer of fake erotic letters for Penthouse, the ex-chief spin-doctor for the government who chaired intelligence meetings. Hypocrisy? Oh no.
I suppose it is possible that the government did not put a foot wrong in this whole affair. And I can’t pretend to be at the hub of the political spectrum – my leafy village certainly isn’t on a par with Westminster. However, watching the news tonight is genuinely cathartic, and a subtext in their comments is telling. Stream upon stream of reporters are dissecting the report, going through the motions of objective analysis but seemingly unable to believe the findings or the sheer one-sidedness of the conclusion. None of them, not even seasoned insiders, predicted the outcome – seasoned insiders that have lived and breathed political debate and cynicism for years inside Westminster; seasoned insiders like Nick Robinson, ITV News’ Chief Political Reporter, who today looked deeply unhappy and talked openly on live television of a “whitewash”. Reporters like Channel 4’s Jon Snow, who seemed horrified at the implications for open investigative reporting in the future and had verbal fisticuffs with the beautiful Margaret Beckett, who almost admitted that government scientists are now unable to voice their concerns about anything much without being sacked.
But I suppose Rod Little, who gave his always entertaining opinion on the Radio 4 Today programme this afternoon, is right – never in history has a Law Lord conducted an inquiry with an anti-government outcome. Too late are the recent revelations of doubts in the evidence Lord Hutton took as fact. Three senior medical experts have cast doubt on the “suicide” of Dr Kelly, according to ThisIsLondon – a subject I harped on about a couple of months ago.
But it’s all too late now, isn’t it?
I leave you with Steve Bell’s excellent cartoon in The Guardian. A thousand words…

Kellywatch: The excellent HangingDay comes up with two salient points over the last couple of days: firstly that Andrew McKinley, the reviled Labour MP who publicly and brusquely “interrogated” David Kelly before his death, is actually rather a good egg. Look at HangingDay’s account of McKinley’s appearance at the Hutton Inquiry – he comes across remarkably well, a very underreported fact of today’s papers.
And the second, VERY well-noticed point, centres on the former MI6 chief’s rather too staunch defence of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell – as the Telegraph said, you could “almost hear the sound of ranks being closed”. In his veiled attack of the BBC, Scarlett disputed Andrew Gilligan’s assertions, and managed to reveal that there were actually no missiles in Iraq at all. Read it all here.
Oooh, I feel very political today…

So, let’s get this straight.
David Kelly was a man who has been on many visits to Iraq. He had seen countless horrors while he was there. The BBC describes him as a “gentle man with a core of steel.” “There was no give in that man,” said close colleague Scott Ritter in the same BBC article. He was hardened by many years in Iraq, one of the world’s toughest countries, as a high-profile inspector. Yes, he was under intense pressure when he revealed his conversation with Andrew Gilligan, but surely the man was not naive enough or inexperienced enough to buckle?
And then his death. It may well be a suicide. If it was, then there must be other extreme and underhand factors (such as the “dark actors” he described hours before his death) that drove this hardened man to end his successful life so suddenly. The ordeal may have been over within a couple of weeks, there was no reason to end it all now.
Imagine, for a moment, that it wasn’t suicide. If you wanted someone out of the way, you would trail them to a deserted area. Then, you would kill someone in a way that would look for all the world like the victim had done it himself. He slit one wrist – is there any precedent for a man dying after slitting just one wrist? Privately, many doctors agree that it is unlikely enough blood would be lost. And this happened in woods where no one could see him, and where there would be no sign of a struggle.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But Esther Rantzen was the first person to comment on it this morning on Radio 4. Have a listen to it here – skip to 37 minutes. She doesn’t say it directly, but implies a whole heap of suspicion in the medical community.
Important, pivotal people eliminated – it’s happened before, it’ll happen again. Will others have the courage to wonder?Update: David Kelly’s colleague implies that we “don’t really know the reason he died yet, do we… we need to know what happened”. Listen here, 5 minutes in…

Start your conspiracy theories… David Kelly, the weapons expert accused by the Government of handing anti-government information to the reporter Andrew Gilligan (causing all sorts of news this week), has gone missing, and police have found a body. Did anyone see a man answering to the name of Campbell running away from the scene?

Tim at Bloggerheads has outdone himself come up with a corker of a picture regarding the news…:Alastair the Assassin

Well, made me laugh…
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